Oh Mandy, you came and you bought me... actually I'm not sure what.

There are precious few moments in this life where you get to experience a genuine stunned silence; sometimes it's a good thing like when a kid gets that Christmas present they wanted but previously thought was too expensive or extravagant to genuinely find its way under a tree or into a stocking (I had one of those exact ones upon the unveiling of a Lego Death Star at the ripe old age of 36) and sometimes it's a bad one like when you realise your co-worker actually genuinely did just casually throw out that racist joke and nobody has a clue how to respond because in a professional environment you aren't meant to just tell people to go fuck themselves for being the arse-end of humanity. Had one of those too. Nothing however compares to the en masse stunned silence of a cinema screen full of people wholly unsure of how to go about living their lives with that movie imprinted on their retinas. That one, I will remember for a long old time.

It's very difficult to accurately describe Mandy without spoiling the experience. Not really in terms of plot spoilers; the plot is almost secondary to the purpose. There are a whole host of adjectives you can throw around, sure, but that's all subjective. In fact the only undeniable thing is that it's polarising, as paradoxical as that might appear. As far as analogies go, not even comparing it to Marmite really does it justice. It is very much like Marmite though, if Marmite was a gore soaked, psychedelic revenge horror.

The opening 45 minutes feels incredibly slow. Unsettlingly, unnervingly, crushingly slow. Describing the pacing as glacial would be a disservice to glaciers; you can measure the first act in epochs. This is not a typical horror movie in any way shape or form; what it is, is an hour of steadily  thickening dread followed by an hour of brute force and ever increasing mayhem and carnage. It isn't until things get going that you realise how deliberate that pacing was as everything ramps up to eleven and we get to see Nicholas Cage in Full Tilt Nick Cage Berzerker mode, which is a thing to behold. What sets it apart from being a run of the mill, straight to DVD crap fest is how beautifully put together it is.

Panos Cosmatos (whose Dad directed Rambo II, Stallone's Cobra and Tombstone, just so you know) is certainly not your average director. There is a clear love and respect for the 70s and 80s here, in genre, outlook and design and although tonally they're way different, it kind of reminded me of an adult Stranger Things. Everything is so deliberate, from the extreme lighting to the eerie score, that even when the events unfolding on screen are so outlandish that they put even the sternest of suspensions of belief to the test there's always something even more extreme happening to either elevate the banality or normalise the insanity depending on which half of the movie you're in.

I said before I wasn't going to spoil the plot, but in very broad terms this is at once The Crow by way of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw and an absolutely metric shit-ton of hallucinogenic substances  and at the same time nothing like that any of those movies at all (definitely a heroic quantity of drugs consumed in the conception of this movie). Rest assured however that this is the best Nicholas Cage we've seen in some time because he's either worked out when to tone things down and when to let loose or he's been magnificently wrangled by the director. When the hour mark hits and the rampage begins, there is literally nobody you'd rather have playing lunatic; it's like his genes aligned with a cosmic convergence and created the greatest bug eyed maniac ever to grace our screens. It won't ruin anything to let you know that yes there's a chainsaw fight, yes there's a home-forged battle axe that could have come straight out of a video game and yes it ends up sticking into and through a host of the softer parts of people's anatomies. Brilliant.

I'm not completely blind to the fact that a lot of people will absolutely hate this movie. There are a couple of unintentionally hilarious moments (one involving a box cutter, one involving the line "you ripped my shirt!" and one involving a handful of cocaine all within about as minute of one another) and you will inevitably come out with a host of questions, not limited to: where did this mild mannered lumberjack learn to be a redneck version of John Wick (John Hick anyone? No? Fine, whatever)? What the hell was in that jar? Don’t chainsaws have dead man’s switches that stop the blades if you drop them? What in the name of all that's holy did I just watch? The good news is although that the powers that be decided to give this a really limited run in the cinemas (by which I mean it was shown for two nights only at an art house cinema in Leicester and none of the surrounding multiplexes) it came out on DVD last Monday so I’m currently on my second viewing, in the relative comfort of my own home. It’s just as mental and makes about as much/little sense as the first time round, but in comparison to the cinema, the first half hour positively raced by. I don’t know if that’s because I knew what was coming; I certainly wasn’t as surprised by the sudden appearance of Linus Roache Junior getting his screen time from behind his dressing gown that’s for sure. Happily though, it doesn’t lose any of its intensity on the small screen. It’s just as menacing, just as trippy and you will have just as many questions, possibly even more. Thankfully, the answer to all of them is "it doesn't matter" because once you get past the build-up Mandy is just an utterly bonkers work of brutal genius.